*Tour-ette from the Garment District... Oh, how NYC changes! NOT always for the best! 3/9/2024

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*Tour-ette from the subway station in Times Square, and some underground musical theatre! 3/9/2024

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*Tour-ette from the Times Square/Garment District in NYC for a work and weekend jaunt... 3/9/2024

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “My Merry Memoirs”… The Pumpkin House…

There I am at "21" having lunch with Pet Harkness as she tells me about the famous "Pumpkin House" going on the auction block... you know the one, right?… way up on the upper West Side of Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River. It was 1936, and it had been built in the 1920s. I'd been at dozens of parties in it and had always wanted to own it even if it WAS a bit far uptown…and cantilevered off the edge of those cliffs up near Inwood! But the views! And the quiet!... oh my God!

Of course, there was the danger of it falling down in an earthquake, but I met a nice seismologist, Dr. Ibrahim McSulzberger at Rockefeller University, and he had reassured me that they were fairly rare in NYC, and he showed me his seismic water displacement theory while we were taking a bubble bath together. No matter how turbulent the water got, it was unlikely that the bath tub would fall off its foundations! …and we tried many times!! I was ever so relieved!… and my goodness, the doctor got so frisky when he was describing tectonics, but I told him I could find "no FAULTS in his technique"! He laughed and laughed at my little joke! Sadly, I lost out on the bidding for the Pumpkin House!! To Pet Harkness!! She used a pseudonym!…"Kitty Walensky"…or… "Pussy Gabor"…. and then she moved into it with Ibrahim!!… (selfish little bitch!)...

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Sybil Bruncheon's "I Remember!" series.... My first Winter in NYC....

A little known fact to lots of folks here in the online age of the 21st century; there was an equivalent to the rural outhouse here in NYC up until fairly recently. Many tenement apartments (four or more to a floor in the late 19th/early 20th century buildings and always walk-ups) had their ...um...water-closets (“WCs”) in the public halls on each floor. “WC” was the discreet way of saying “toilet”, and thousands of people actually shared their toilets with other apartments. Little doors in the halls with NO apartment letter or number on them, they concealed a toilet ONLY, with just enough room for you to sit or stand and pull the door closed against you (YES! AGAINST YOU!) and latch it with a slide bolt usually.

"Noisy use" was frowned on, as were any unpleasant smells....and it took work and discernment to avoid both. Timing and a pack of matches were a person's best friends. Hangovers, vomiting, extreme and/or explosive bouts of diarrhea, etc. were the end of the world... Taking turns was done as discreetly as possible, much like the early cooperation on the telephone with so-called party lines.....but that's another story entirely.

My first apartment in NYC had a water-closet in the hall....but I considered myself lucky, very lucky, to have my own bathtub under the counter in my enormous kitchen. Many folks had to share a bathtub in the hall as well as a toilet, and you scampered in your chenille bathrobe from your front door to both the WC, and the bathtub closet next to it and then back home again, before someone knocked on one door or the other to “hurry up!”.

Some of my most romantic early memories in the city are of candlelight baths in my own kitchen during a blizzard with my first great love, Greg, in that old cast iron bathtub with the claw feet, the counter-cover flipped up, a cherry pie in the oven, a hearty beef stew bubbling away on the huge gas stove. Clanking steam coming up in the radiator and beginning to hiss merrily…. The candles, maybe a dozen or so, flickering in the unthreatening drafts through the 100 year old window sashes, rattling from the wind gusting off the East River. And I remember the scratchy reception on the little radio playing old holiday music the whole week after Christmas just to keep things cheerful and glad. Being poor and struggling was so much lovelier somehow back then. I worried and went without, but I never felt hopeless or lost. And every morning, even in those first freezing days of January, was a bright and bracing adventure, and a sparkling, new world always held its sunny arms open to me as I ran down the steps of that old tenement…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Thanksgivings Past"... sur-REAL.....

It was never clear and certainly never explained why in 1933 with the Depression raging and tensions building in Europe that the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade committee turned the design of the floats and balloons over to Salvador Dali...All that could be determined later was that he should have been more closely supervised by the staff of the store...or at least by the in-house employee psychologist, if only to avoid possible scandals and lawsuits. But on Thursday morning, November 30th, when his unexplained "Fish With High Heels" sailed down the avenue and it was met by a shrieking crowd, nothing could be done. Nor was there much help that medical and police personnel could do for the dead and dying among the stampede victims. The toll might have remained at only a few hundred, but the hideous thing broke loose from its handlers and drifted North-North-East into Yonkers where it began its clumsy rampage of terror and destruction into Duchess county and on up into Connecticut before a squadron of biplanes shot it down and burned the hated thing in a bonfire in Hartford on the steps of the state capitol...

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